I think that may be a major debate. It may well be there are various tech/regulatory reasons why it cannot be ANT. But we have 3 years to worry about it.
This was a fear a couple of months back, personally I feel that the native currency is a LOT more than simply an aspiration now. The ERC-20 token is convenient right now but its limitations vs a native currency are obvious.
which is not being worked on RIGHT NOW. There are only 24 hours in the day and a limited no of devs with the relevant knowledge and skills to bring forward this currency.
I will start getting uppity about it if I dont hear of work starting in earnest in say 6-9 months. There is an awful lot of work in front of the team even without the native token and we need a resilient network, well tested and hopefully well used first to justify the effort to bring that token to fruition.
The network is not ready for the token and the world is not quite ready for the network yet.
It should be remembered that a lot of the work on the native token has already been completed IIUC. @dirvine ??